


a hair's breadth between us

by Fuzzyface



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, Haircuts, Outstanding Heterosexual Jester Lavorre, Sexual Tension, let these girls kiss already, remember when jester called beau's hair beautiful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-21 05:50:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19996903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fuzzyface/pseuds/Fuzzyface
Summary: “Your hair,” Jester repeats, rolling over on the mattress to lay on her stomach. “it looks nice.”“Ha, nah,” Beau mumbles, running a hand over the back of her head. “I need a haircut. It’s all overgrown now, doesn’t really look cool anymore.”“I can do it,” Jester blurts suddenly. Her fingers are tingling, and she’s not sure why. “Cut your hair, I mean.”





	a hair's breadth between us

**Author's Note:**

> I did not edit this AT ALL I was too caught up in the euphoria of being able to publish the 300th beaujester fic, please forgive me
> 
> Beaujester Week Day 1 - First Kiss

“I wish my hair was like yours,” Jester sighs.

Nothing really prompted the thought, but she says it anyway. It’s hot in their inn room, bordering on sticky, and Beau’s topknot looks so much more comfortable than the way Jester’s bob sticks to the back of her neck with sweat.

“Huh?”

“Your hair,” Jester repeats, rolling over on her mattress to lay on her stomach. “it looks nice.” She means ‘nice’ like ‘feels nice’, like ‘it must be so much less gross and sticky when your head is shaved’, but she knows it just sounds like she’s telling Beau she looks good. Beau’s fingers doing that nervous little fiddling they do when she’s flustered only confirms it.

She doesn’t mind that, actually. Beau is a lot of things, and ‘nice’ only scratches the surface.

“Ha, nah,” Beau mumbles, running a hand over the back of her head. “I need a haircut. It’s all overgrown now, doesn’t really look cool anymore.”

Jester frowns, suddenly and deeply uncomfortable with the unfamiliar look of insecurity on Beau’s face. She hates to see it on any of her friends, of course, but on Beau it’s particularly wrong. Beau isn’t supposed to worry about what people think of her.

“Well, I think it still looks cool, Beau,” she says, because she can’t say all those other thoughts that are jumbled up in her head. It doesn’t take away the look on Beau’s face, but she stop staring firmly at her feet and tries a smile in Jester’s direction. She’s getting a lot better at them.

“Thanks,” she says quietly. Her fingers keep running compulsively over the back of her head, carding the short hair back and forth.

“I can do it,” Jester blurts suddenly. “Cut your hair, I mean.” Her fingers are tingling, and she’s not sure why. Sometimes she feels like she’s full of too much energy, telling her she needs to just _do_ something. And right now what she needs is to touch the shaved part of Beau’s head and finally know what it feels like. It looks soft - like Caduceus’ fur.

“Uh,” Beau says, hesitating a long moment, her fingers frozen where they hover over the fuzz on the back of her neck. Jester waits patiently to be told no, because Beau has that look on her face that people always do before they politely grimace and tell her to go away. But instead the monk shrugs, dropping her hand to her lap. “Sure, I guess.”

There’s a straight razor in the tiny cupboard beside the washbasin, alongside a few grimy towels and a comb that Jester shivers at the idea of even touching. She flicks the blade from its sheath, examining her wobbly reflection in the metal. Prestidigitation lifts the coat of rust easily enough; she hopes it does the same for any old gross blood stuck in the cracks.

Beau’s still watching her expectantly from the bed, legs tucked up butterfly-style under her, so Jester closes the drawer and crosses back to join her, nudging her firmly but gently to the side when she refuses to make room for her on the mattress. Beau digs an elbow into her ribs and sticks her tongue out playfully as she finally scooches over enough that Jester can squeeze herself between her back and headboard. It’s an awkward fit at best.

“Are we doing this on the bed?” Beau asks.

Jester frowns. “Well, it’s more comfortable than sitting on the floor.”

“I just mean, uh, I still have to sleep here.” She runs a hand over the scruffy hair on the back of her neck. “This stuff is itchy as hell once you cut it off.”

Jester _tsk_ ’s softly, pushing Beau’s hand away. “We can clean it up,” she asserts. Beau doesn’t have _that_ much hair, she decides, running her fingers lightly through the overgrown fuzz to be sure. It’s as soft as she expected, which sends a little thrill of delight through her. “Besides,” she adds, “you can always stay in _my_ bed, if you want.”

She doesn’t really mean for it to sound like a come-on - just a teasing joke - but Beau squares her shoulders and ducks her head anyway. The same way she does whenever a pretty girl makes eye contact back at her from across the tavern. “Maybe,” Jester just barely hears her mutter, and she pats her gently on the shoulder in sympathy.

She knows she shouldn’t tease Beau so much. The earnest flush on her cheeks each time is adorable but - Jester knows she should be nicer. It’s just very easy to forget, sometimes.

She lets herself forget again by lifting the razor and making the first sweeping cut from Beau’s neck to just under her topknot. The blade sticks a little in the dry, thick hair and the first few cuts are more than a little choppy until she gets a better hang of it. Soft, prickly hairs fall like snow onto her lap and the quilt beneath her. Beau wriggles slightly, huffing out a faint laugh.

“Alright?” Jester asks, pulling back a bit before she accidentally sticks her with the razor.

“Yeah, fine, just forgot what it feels like to get it cut,” she says, reaching back hesitantly to probe at the new stripes of shorn hair. “Tickles a little.”

Jester’s chest flutters slightly and she hums a brief acknowledgement before getting back on task. Once she’s clipped away most of the shagginess, the razor glides much more easily, shaping up the soft fuzz that remains instead of just hacking unevenly across her scalp. She moves in quick, neat strokes. Hair lands in soft little piles in the folds of her skirt.

She’s not entirely sure what to do with her other hand, but it seems to naturally find itself a place between Beau’s collarbone and shoulder, fingers digging into the soft skin just hard enough to keep her still as Jester carefully tilts her head this way and that. Her skin is very warm, warmer than humans usually are. Somehow it makes the whole thing feel intensely intimate, and she has to take a moment to pause and shift herself back slightly because she can feel her breath where it ghosts off the back of Beau’s neck.

“How’s it going?” Beau asks nervously in the small break, trying to sneak a peek over her shoulder. There’s a few stray bits of clipped hair stuck across her forehead.

“It’s going _perfect_ ,” Jester asserts, pressing a finger to her jaw and turning her face back the other way. “Now hold still so I don’t take your ear off.”

“You’d be the one who’d have to heal it,” she mutters, but obliges, settling her hands comfortably on her knees. It looks distinctly meditative, which Jester almost snorts a laugh at. Only Beau would look so peaceful with a razor held right up against her neck.

It doesn’t take long before Beau’s undercut it shorn down nearly as far as it was when Jester first met her. It’s certainly not perfect, and Jester pouts quietly that she can’t get the fade quite right with just the dinky straight razor, but it’s soft and mostly even. She clips away the last few hairs at the base of Beau’s neck, feeling an unexpected pang at the realization that she was done. She’d gotten into a very relaxing rhythm, but if she keeps on shaving Beau would be bald within a few minutes. She tries to cheer herself up with the thought.

“Want me to fix your sideburns, too?” She asks somewhat absently, brushing away a bit of hair from Beau’s shoulder. There isn’t much there to fix, just a few overgrown wisps of hair over her ears, but Beau nods almost immediately.

“Yeah, sure. I mean, might as well while we’re doing this, right?” She peeps at Jester over her shoulder like she’s asking permission. Jester grins.

“Oh course,” she says, scooching back what little she could and smoothing out the skirts on her lap. “You have to turn around,” she adds when Beau doesn’t move, “or I can’t reach your face.”

Beau wriggles around to face her, and there’s an awkward moment where they try to figure out how to keep their legs from tangling up as they squish together on the tiny mattress. Jester finally just straddles herself across Beau’s knees, and it’s not comfortable but it’ll at least hold her still while Jester fixes up what’s left of her undercut.

Beau grunts and makes a halfhearted effort to wiggle her legs but whether people like to admit it or not Jester is _strong_ and she gives up quickly. “Hurry up before you break my legs,” she grumbles, and Jester laughs and pinches her thigh playfully. Her hips buck just slightly and Jester almost drops the razor.

“Hah, uh, little ticklish,” Beau mumbles, and she doesn’t blush very often - or at least Jester doesn’t see her blush very often - but she’s _definitely_ blushing now. Jester’s not blushing, she’s certain, but she feels -

Jester’s had this thought before, because she and Beau stand _very_ close together a lot of the time, and Jester’s brain is funny and likes to run away from her and imagine things that she hadn’t even been thinking of. Like ‘our faces are really close right now’ and ‘we kind of look like we’re about to kiss, don’t we?’ And then one of them eventually turns away, and Jester laughs at how silly of an idea it is.

She tries to laugh now, but it gets stuck in her throat. Something like anxiety tugs at her chest, and she definitely doesn’t like _that_ , so she lifts the razor once again and takes off almost Beau’s entire sideburn in one swipe.

Beau huffs a surprised laugh as the clump of hair drops into her lap. “Gods, Jes, were you not kidding about taking my ear off?”

“If you don’t stop _talking_ and _wiggling_ I just might,” Jester says, and tugs Beau’s head down a little more roughly than she needs to. But what she actually needs is for Beau to not be staring directly into her eyes like that right now, so it’s not unfair, if she thinks about it.

It only takes a couple more slow scrapes of the blade before all the wispy bits are gone and Beau’s head is smooth and soft like velvet. Jester rubs it a few times, just relishing the unfamiliar feeling of close-shorn hair under her fingers. Beau leans into it and makes this quiet grunt of pleasure and Jester realizes for the first time that Beau’s eyes have been slowly slipping closed, that her head has been dipping closer and closer to Jester’s shoulder as she works.

They really are sitting awfully close.

This isn’t a thought Jester’s had before. This mix of fear and anticipation and _wanting_ because this time she could do something. There’s no one else around. There’s no monsters to fight or danger to chase. Just the two of them, and Jester thinks that Beau wouldn’t even stop her if she did something. She could, if she wanted.

She does want. And she’s terrified of what she might do about it.

It takes her a few tries to slide the razor back into its sheath. Her fingers keep fumbling, they don’t quite work right. Beau’s not paying attention, because Beau is gently probing the sides of her head. Jester should maybe feel offended by the look of nervousness on her face, but it quickly melts into a satisfied smile as she runs her hand over the shorn hair.

“Wow, this is really good,” she says, with something like wonder in her voice. She meets Jester’s eyes again, and gives a little crooked smile, and whatever direct line she seems to suddenly have to Jester’s windpipe tightens a little more. “Thanks, Jessie.”

“Anytime,” Jester says, as the stupid razor finally snaps into place and she can set it down on the nightstand. She can feel Beau watching her still, maybe about to say something, and Jester clears her throat quickly. “I should get a mirror, though, you didn’t even get to see what I shaved into the back of your head.”

There’s a beat of stunned silence. Jester manages to hold it together for a few long seconds, watching dawning horror and disbelief spread across Beau’s face, before a giggle slips out and then she’s laughing so hard she nearly falls over as Beau lets out the longest breath she thinks she’s ever heard.

“Yeah that’s - okay, yeah, fuck.” Beau tries to look annoyed for about half a second before she cracks. She laughs until she’s snorting, head leaning forward to bump against Jester’s shoulder. All at once the tension is gone, though they’re even closer now. The moment is broken, and with it the sick tautness Jester felt in her stomach, the roiling uncertainty.

Beau sits back up, sniffing as she composes herself. Jester chases her for a moment to bump their foreheads together affectionately. Beau lets her.

“You wanna be my stylist from now on?” Beau asks. “I never really had one, I mean. Not since I was like, a little kid. I usually just cut it myself. You do a better job.”

“Of course!” Jester says brightly. She pets the back of Beau’s head again, because she wants to, and because she knows Beau will let her. “I love your hair.”

“Me too,” Beau murmurs, eyes half-closed at the slight massage. She blinks them open, mouth twisting in distaste. “I mean I like _your_ hair too, I didn’t mean - shit.”

“You should like your hair,” Jester says. “But you can like mine too. I know it’s _very_ pretty.”

Beau grins again - that cocky, crooked smile. There’s a feeling in Jester’s chest again, but this time it’s not so afraid. And when she chases Beau this time, it’s to gently pull their faces together like it’s the easiest thing in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Keep up with my other incredibly late beaujester week submissions at fuzzy-face.tumblr.com


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